Being a restaurant manager is a difficult job. It's fast and stressful, and requires a special combination of skills and personality traits (most importantly, staying calm under pressure). Restaurant managers are responsible for overseeing both food quality and staff operations. The most challenging aspects of being a restaurant manager involve training and motivating staff to constantly meet customer demand.
This involves providing adequate oversight of food preparation protocols, including culinary and food safety training. It also involves taking a practical role in creating a culture that values and offers a level of customer service appropriate to the type of food you are providing. Restaurant employees must be effectively trained so that they have sufficient knowledge of the dishes on the menu to answer customer questions and also to understand the flow of operations enough to prioritize a number of urgent ongoing tasks. Understanding the world of restaurant analytics and the future of the restaurant industry is one of the most important things to consider if you want to become a restaurant manager.
So what do your guests want? When you become a good restaurant manager, you focus your strategy on the needs of your guests. The restaurant industry has a high employment rate for immigrants, partly due to typically low wages and also to the universality of cooking skills. But as you know, receiving complaints is unavoidable and, honestly, crucial to the success of your restaurant. Jill Nelsen has worked as a restaurant manager in California and Minnesota and has more than 10 years of experience managing fast food restaurants, such as Taco Bell and Rax Roast Beef.
There's no way to know in advance exactly how many people will eat at your restaurant or what dishes on the menu they'll order. Having employees from diverse cultures can be a challenge for a restaurant manager because language barriers can prevent communication, especially in training situations. This continuous influx of inexperienced staff is a challenge for restaurant managers because there are always staff members who must be trained or who have not yet managed to catch up. Training restaurant staff can be particularly difficult because food service operations tend to be fast, making it difficult to set aside time for employees to catch up.
When you become a restaurant manager, your guests are the reason you can do what you love every day. Remember that a career in restaurant management is that, with all the training and experience you get, you can move on to many different sectors and careers, says Nelsen, who went from restaurant management to office management, to sales management, bank accounting, publishing and marketing. Nelsen says that the advantage of learning to be a restaurant manager lies in the challenge, the opportunity to advance quickly, and the opportunity to gain a variety of management skills in hospitality. Every time Jerry Westrom interviews a candidate for the restaurant manager position, he talks about all the negative aspects of the position before going into more detail about the positive aspects.
